Election 2018

[pbrower2a]

(11-18-2018, 02:49 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(11-17-2018, 06:02 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: This article does seem to confirm Bob's perception of the information age in conflict with the industrial age, much as two saecula ago the conflict was between the industrial age and the agricultural age-- and involving many of the same states on the progressive and regressive side. Today the red industrial age side is blocking the progress brought by the blue information age side, whereas before the previous civil war the gray agricultural age side was blocking the progress brought by the blue industrial age side.

I am also seeing the S&H Turnings very heavily in play.  Unravellings are supposed to be a time of selfishness and greed.  A crisis period is most for unity, taking action, and transforming values.  The former manifested as Reaganomics, small government, limited spending, providing minimal services.  The latter has not yet manifested, but the blues have tried to advocate it.  

Make America great again?  Just like the 40s through 80s?  The time of tax and spend liberalism?  Can one be great while caring only for one's self?

Technological and artistic achievements will color any age in the cycle. Such an introduced technology as the automobile, phonograph,  television, or the Pill will shape how the Crisis expresses itself. The higher speeds and (by necessity) paved roads allowed people to go farther and faster than in "the surrey with the fringe on the top" and allow to do more hanky-panky in privacy. (The automobile had not made its way to Oklahoma in 1907, but it would soon). Recorded music offered the music being listened to live elsewhere or recently, perhaps disseminating the popular music of the time into places where it might not otherwise be heard. Okay, the recording art around 1940 was better suited for some musical instruments than others -- brasses instead of strings, which ensured that Big Band music would not be played by string orchestras. Television offered much the same material that people saw in a movie theater (cartoons, newsreels, and travelogues), on stage (most of the early TV stars had done vaudeville before the movies did vaudeville in), or perhaps even in church (sermons). Any generation would have found some use for the Pill.

But technologies and cultural achievements do not themselves force the movement of the saecular cycle. They allow reflections. Had television existed in the 1930s as something other than a laboratory curiosity, then  Americans would have gotten news, cartoons, serials, and advertising before they got something cheaply produced or available cheaply -- like a feature film from two years earlier. There might be one network, probably analogous to the Armed Forces Television, and people would get what the government wanted them to get. Much would be didactic (drive safely, how to get more farm output and protect against erosion, advice on cooking, canning, and cleaning... nothing to shake things up).

The conflict is not of technology between the Industrial Age and the Information Age. Both use the same technologies. What differs is content that differs due to differences in core beliefs. The now-reactionary elites associated with the Industrial Era have no desire to suppress the technology of information; it wants to control that information to enforce its ways.